


Y2K

by therudestflower



Category: My So-Called Life
Genre: But you can see something if you want to, College Angela, Flash Forward, Gen, Non-ship fic, Sometimes we get better as we age sometimes we get worse usually both!, The Year 2000, Who is going to read this?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 04:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20668961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therudestflower/pseuds/therudestflower
Summary: Angela finished out 1999 by running into the old suspects. Well. Most of them.





	Y2K

Angela began the new millennium, completely by accident, in Jordan Catalano’s bedroom.

She was supposed to be spending it at her mother’s house. Last year she went back to Cleveland two days after Christmas, under the pretense of retrieving her roommate's cat. Mom didn’t believe her, but she let her go. This year she told Angela two months in advance that she needed to stay for the entire winter break to help pack up their sad house for the sad move so Mom and Danielle could live in the sad condo with Mom’s sad boyfriend.

It was very sad.

Angela began planting seeds that, she should “maybe head back to meet with my professor before the semester begins,” and “would really benefit from some peace and quiet so I can get ahead on reading.”

Mom fixed her with a look and said, “Angela, you have an obligation. You made a commitment and now you have to see it out.”

If it was possible, Mom had gotten more uptight since the divorce. It was like she was overcompensating for the months she spent in bed when they first separated, like three hours without power because she was too depressed to open the electric bill had thrown them so far into disarray that the only way to recover was scheduling everything.

The awkward dance of Mom and Dad calculating how many hours she and Danielle had to spend at each of their depressing houses to be fair wasn’t old enough to be rote, but was familiar. She could deal with it. She just wanted to start a new Millenium with people who understood her.

They literally left New Year’s Eve lunch with the grandparents to go home and stay on their packing schedule. Literally. Angela was pretty sure she was being a very responsible daughter by actually packing and not giving her mother any kind of hard time about it.

Mom insisted on supervising her packing her bedroom and making plans that weren’t going anywhere about getting Angela’s twin bed on a truck to her tiny apartment in Cleveland. Angela was so responsible that, as she kept reminding Mom, she’d made arrangements for Sharon’s parents to pick up her bedroom furniture so that Sharon’s daughter could have it, now that she’d outgrown her crib.

“I don’t know if I like the idea of all your things being flung all over the country,” Mom said.

“Honestly, mother,” Angela sighed, “Do you not like that I’m helping an unwed mother?”

Mom frowned, “Do you think of Sharon that way? Because--”

“No, obviously I’m joking. Do you seriously think I want a twin canopy bed in my apartment? Do you know how much it would cost to ship it there?”

Mom frowned and walked out of the room, like she was the problem.

Angela used being trusted to pack her own possessions to fit the more important things into her suitcase. In her opinion, she was being incredibly mature for a twenty-year-old who had to accept that everything in the room had to either fit into her suitcase or Danielle’s closet. She was willing to part with most things--if she hadn’t used in in the two years she’d been at college, how much did she really care about them?

But there were things that she hadn’t brought because they didn’t belong in a dorm, they belongs in her home. She reached under her bed for a shoebox covered in magazine clippings. Inside were all the letters she’d written and received in high school. Letters from her boyfriends, Rayanne, Rickie, Sharon--even Jordan Catalano. And, technically, Brian Krakow. She fingered through them, and looked over at her suitcase, unsure if these belonged in the 21st century.

She found not one, but three pairs of shoes that belonged to Rayanne. She wasn’t sure if they’d swapped shoes since sophomore year, but Rayanne probably hadn’t been to the house since then either.

There were things that no one could really value except for her, like her yearbooks. The one from freshman year had a photo of her grinning on the Yearbook Committee page, and despite only attending one meeting, her name appeared on the same page for the 1994-1995 yearbook, her sophomore year. The year with Rayanne.

Even though at the time, her brain was consumed with Jordan Catalano, that year was really about Rayanne. Sometimes it felt like it was all that high school was, and that freshman year and her last two years were just bookends, defined by how much or how little she and Rayanne spoke.

The yearbook was emblazoned with the title “The Year 2000” and Angela wondered if the actual yearbook committee would be pleased that she was looking at it on New Year’s Eve. The yearbook was interspersed with predictions from the students about what the year 2000’s was going to be like. Without looking, she found one from Rickie.

“I think in the year 2000 we will understand each other, and really just get along better. Or maybe it will be worse. Or maybe both.” -Rickie Vasquez, Class of 1997

She’d seen Rickie in the first couple hours she’d been home. She lied to Mom about when her Grayhound got in, so he could pick her up and they could go to lunch. She figured she’d show up just when Mom was leaving to pick her up at the station, and it would be a nice surprise for everyone. And, surprisingly, it was.

Rickie was living in New York, and grinned when he said, “I know, I know, I’m a cliche. I can’t help it, I’m happy.”

Angela smiled and said, “Good, you deserve to be happy.”

He was staying with his cousin, the one who’d come back and decided to talk to him, and he didn’t seem happy when Angela questioned why he’d even want to be with him. While driving Angela to her house he said, “I know you’re going to be caught up with family stuff, but some people are getting together on New Year’s eve. You should come, just give me a call and I’ll pick you up.”

“Some people?” Angela repeated, “That’s so high school, Rickie.”

He gave her a half-smile. “I mean, didn’t you come back for some high school, in a way?”

Telling Mom that Rickie would be picking her up in an hour went over like gangbusters, but when Angela choose to point out that at least she wasn’t spending it with Dad, Mom’s face went smooth and weirdly happy, and she said, “Well, just call me at some point so I don’t go days into the 21st century without seeing you. And don’t drink and drive.”

Rickie picked her up in his cousin’s car, and to her surprise. Sharon was in the backseat. Angela put on her seatbelt and turned around, reaching out to take her hand.

“What are you doing here?” Angela asked, “Where’s Alexis?”

“She’s meeting us at Tino’s,” Sharon said, sarcastically. “My parents decided for the first time in four years that they would stop punishing me for being a teenage parent and like, watch their granddaughter for a few hours. It’s a 21st-century miracle, I didn’t question it.”

Angela knew she’d been to Tino’s before, many times in high school, but if asked she couldn’t tell you where it was, what it looked like, or--sometimes--what Tino even looked like. Rickie once joked that the eleven times she smoked pot in senior year had fried her brain, but she was pretty sure she didn’t know what Tino looked like before either.

At his apartment, she didn’t think he was even there. The apartment was packed with people who she didn’t recognize, and beer that could now say was shitty because she knew it was, not because a senior said it. Between the music and the blue lights, she couldn’t help but think about the night Rayanne OD’d, and it occurred to her that Rayanne was probably somewhere in this apartment.

Trying to be subtle, she looked around, trying to see past the gridlock of bodies and heads taller than her. Rickie found her and and leaned into her ear.

“She’s not here,” he whisper shouted, “Last I heard, she’s in Denver now.”

Angela tried to pull back enough to look into his eyes. “Denver?” she asked.

Rickie nodded. “That’s where she said she was last time she called me.”

Angela never full on stopped talking to Rayanne. After a year of sliding into this circle of high school, the amalgamation of stoners and art kids and punks were as much Angela’s friends as Rayanne’s. They went to the same parties, sat on the same couches, and even once in a while shared the backseat of a car. Even though she and Jordan broke up later and Angela told Rayanne she’d forgiven her later, it was impossible to go back to where they were.

Still, Angela didn’t realize she’d fallen so out of touch with Rayanne she didn’t know she was in Denver.

Sharon found them and yelled, “I hate it here. Let’s leave.”

Angela hated it too, and Rickie had always hated it, so they left.

Rickie had a ton of cash, somehow, so they went to a diner and got oversized milkshakes. Rickie and Angela had fakes, but Sharon didn’t and was too worried about seeing parents from daycare--“who would call social services if they saw me there”--to go to bars that were lax about carding.

Rickie talked the diner staff into letting them us their phone to find another party. He came back to the table with a stiff smile on his face, “Okay,” he said, “so, here’s what it is. Most everyone we like in high school left, or is--rest in peace Amelia--in jail or lie...just not available. That said, we don’t have to necessarily go to a part to--”

“Just say it Rickie,” Sharon prompted.

“The only party out there that doesn’t totally suck is in Jordan Catalano’s apartment.”

Sharon whips her head to look at Angela and through sheer force of will, she keeps her face neutral.

Jordan was pretty much the same as Rayanne, they still had the same friends, but she saw him less now that she wasn’t trying to find excuses to hang out with him. After a month of on and off dating and the truly awkward instance of losing her virginity in the back of his car behind a pharmacy, she didn’t feel any real desire to talk to him.

“What does totally not suck mean?” Sharon asked.

“Not all motorheads, some actual theater people I would really like to see? And not just swamp beer.”

Sharon turned to Angela with pleading eyes. “Can we go?” she begged, “I may not get the chance to do this again until Alexis is forty, I need some time with people who can speak in full sentences.”

“You might not find that at Jordan’s apartment,” Angela hedged. Sharon’s gaze didn’t let up. “Fine,” Angela sighed, “I don’t care, actually. I haven’t thought of him in four years.”

“Lie,” Sharon sang.

“Do you want to go or not?” Angela asked.

Sharon sipped down the rest of her milkshake and stood up. “Yes,” she said, “let’s go.”

Angela performed admirably as they pulled up to Jordan’s apartment building and fought not to over-analyze the overstuffed garbage can topped with snow by the door, or the dusty chandelier in the lobby. When they buzzed up, someone who wasn’t Jordan answered and didn’t wait for Rickie to finish his sentence before buzzing them up.

Once they got inside, she admirably did not get over fixated on what was clearly a new couch with a blanket over the back, and an actual rubber mat that Rickie reminded her to put her snowy boots on.

The apartment was small, but even under the people on the couch and the people playing beer pong on the kitchen table, Angela could see that it was clean and well lit and the furniture wasn’t fished out of a dumpster.

She’d been picturing something like Rayanne’s first apartment. Angela had only been once, during Fall Break of her freshman year. She was renting the room above someone’s garage. There was no furniture but there were plenty of juice boxes and weed, and Angela spent a few hours high on Rayanne’s futon mattress on the floor, pressing her fingertips against Rayanne’s.

“I miss you,” Rayanne sighed, “why can’t I be like it was? Because I slept with a guy you never really had?”

Angela used her free hand to run her fingers over Rayanne’s nails. They were narrower and more curved than Angela’s, and she used to be fiercely jealous. “We were just never the same,” Angela said. “It wouldn’t have lasted.”

“The same is boring,” Rayanne said, “no one wants the same.”

Angela thought of the roommate back at Case Western who she shared clothes with and left notes on their whiteboard for Angela to find. At the time she thought they’d be each other’s maid of honor. “Everyone wants the same.”

They exchanged a few postcards, but once Rickie moved to New York she lost track of Rayanne a bit. Rickie gave her reports, sometimes, but she felt less motivated to keep up with Rayanne as time went on.

Angela had pointedly not kept up with Jordan. In high school it was hard not to, he stopped showing up at some point but once, after word had gotten around that he’d left home and was living in a room above a club, he’d turned up on their doorstep and asked for $5 for cab ride home. Angela wasn’t at home at the time, but Danielle reported she’d broke into Angela’s piggy bank and given it to him.

When she and her college friends traded stories, she referred to Jordan as this truly dumb guy she’d lost her virginity to, and left out all the hours she obsessed over him. She estimated that she had lost seven months of her high school education to the way he consumed her mind like an infectious disease, and it was easy to make fun of him with other people and downplay what had happened.

“Oh, he totally has a girlfriend,” Sharon said, glancing at herself in a mirror in the hallway that, yes, Jordan would have never hung up by himself. Angela nodded. She wasn’t jealous, she was actually relieved for an explanation for this place that wasn’t that Jordan had suddenly become a better human being.

It took no time at all for her to run into Jordan, pulling a pan of rice crispy treats out of the fridge. He stopped and looked at her, with the pan still in his hands and the door open, squinty.

Did he seriously not remember her?

“Hey,” he said, “Angela. Whoa. Hey.”

Angela couldn’t help the stupid giggle that came out of her, “Hey,” she said.

God, why was she suddenly a fifteen year old again?

“You’re like, here,” he said. He stepped towards her, then seemed to remember the pan in his hands. He turned around and put it on the counter. In that time, Angela managed to take in his appearance for what it was.

His hair was short, buzzed on the sides and a little longer on top. That meant he got a haircut. He was wearing a flannel that Angela remembered him having in freshman year, but underneath it he was wearing a pale pink shirt that Angela had definitely never seen before which meant he had enough money to buy one new shirt. He had a bit of acne on his forehead which meant...something.

“Hey,” Jordan said.

“You said, that,” Angela said, “Three times now.”

Jordan nodded. “Right. Right. That...college is working out for you.”

"What?"

“College,” Jordan said, “You’re in college, aren’t you? Makes you smart.”

“I was always smart,” Angela said.

“Right,” Jordan said.

She was pretty sure he’d said the same ten words in different combinations for this entire conversation.

“Hey!” a woman’s voice said. Angela turned around and saw Heather Chim. She was holding four bottled beers and she held one hand out to Angela. She carefully extracted a beer from between her fingers. Heather gave her a polite smile, and handed the other one to Jordan. She was Jordan’s girlfriend, the reason this place looked habitable by humans. Heather put the other beers on the counter, and picked one up for herself before sidling up to Jordan. With his eyes still on Angela, he put an arm around her.

“Did you know Heather?” he asked her.

Angela shook herself out of staring at Jordan’s hand curled around her skinny, skinny arm. She smiled in the way her mother taught her before she could talk. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah totally. You were a senior when we were sophomores, right?”

Heather glanced at Jordan, “I don’t know, were you the same year as Jordan? Later on, I mean.”

Okay, their high school was pretty big and Heather was two years older, but she could at least pretend to remember Angela. Angela had seen her picture in the yearbook just that afternoon, with Salutatorian under her name. But no one at their high school remembered her for that, they remembered her for blowing Jack Sanchez under the bleachers during a home game.

“Yeah,” Angela said, “yeah we were together until he, um…”

“Dropped out?” Heather prompted, “Yeah, we were together until he got let back twice, imagine how much more time together we would have had if he ever understood ‘i before e, except after c.’”

“Oh,” Angela said, “I mean...that’s kind of. He had a learning disability?”

“This is Angela,” Jordan said.

Heather laughed and poked Jordan playfully in the cheek. “Oh shit, I didn’t know your teeny bobber girlfriend was a School Psychologist. Honey, you should have stayed with her, you could be a college graduate by now.”

“You know who I am?” Angela asked. She didn’t think it was a good time to gush about her career plans.

“Not to see you,” Heather said, “but yeah. What don’t I know about Jordan’s life?”

There was a time that Angela would have given up a limb to know where Jordan lived, what size shoe he wore, anything. And the idea that anyone else got to know those things would have set her on fire. But despite having all sorts of information about Jordan available to her just by virtue of being in his apartment, Angela wanted to go find Rickie. She nodded and said, “Wow, I wish someone knew everything about my life.”

“Heather’s in college too,” Jordan offered, “she’s getting her Nurse Practitioner license.”

“Oh so you’re already a nurse?” Angela asked.

“Yes, but please don’t show me your rash.”

“I won’t,” Angela said, “I’m going to go find Rickie. Good to see you. Meet you. Though.”

It turned out to be a little difficult to avoid Heather and Jordan in their own apartment, but Angela managed it until ten minutes before midnight. She ran into Jordan when she was coming out of the bathroom.

“Hey,” Jordan said, “um. Sorry about--well Heather has had a lot to drink.”

“She should work on her bedside manner,” Angela said. Jordan shrugged. “Does she always make fun of you?” Angela asked.

Jordan gave one of those loud sighs that Angela found so mysterious back when, but she now recognized as a bodily function. “She’s not. I did get held back twice. I did not know how to read until--well I still can’t, really. But she doesn’t think I’m some--I don’t know Angela. Half the time I didn’t know if you liked me or the idea that you were some, fucking war nurse healing me.”

“She’s the nurse,” Angela couldn’t help but point out.

“Yeah, and--”

\--and you’re the budding school psychologist, Angela finished for him, even though there was no way he knew that. Who had pre-written her grad school application essay about learning her high school boyfriend couldn’t read, and that awakening a desire to be a professional capable of intervening early so no one else would go that long without intervention.

“Is this really how you want to end the 20th century?” Angela asked. “You want to rehash a three-week relationship that happened over a quarter of our lives ago.”

Jordan smiled. He smiled so much now. “Yeah, nothing back then matters anyway.”

She found Rickie squished between some strangers on the couch, watching TV. The screen tld her there were three minutes until midnight. She went behind the couch and leaned over, Rickie reached up to catch her hands.

“Hey, do you have Rayanne’s number?” she asked.

“I mean, yeah.”

“Can I have it?”

“Now?” Rickie asked, “The ball is about to drop.”

“I’ll be quick,” Angela said. Rickie fished for a pen and handed her the number, written down on the receipt from the diner.

There wasn’t a phone in the kitchen, so Angela bypassed the FUCK OFF sign on the bedroom door and went inside. The bed was piled with dirty clothes and books. The lights were off, but the room was lit up by the Christmas lights outside and the reflection on the snow. Angela found a white phone on the bedside table and shoved some clothes aside to give herself a place to sit down.

Out in the living room, she could hear Rickie calling people over to the TV to watch the ball drop. She dialed Rayanne’s number.

Rayanne answered after one ring. “Yeah?” she said. She sounded tired.

“Hey,” Angela said, “hey, Rayanne?”

“Angela?” Rayanne asked, voice rising. “What in the heaven and hell? Why are you calling me, isn’t the ball about to drop there?”

“Oh, yeah,” Angela said, “yeah I guess. I just wanted to you know, say hi. How’s Colorado?”

“Well,” Rayanne said. Angela could picture her settling down in the metal chair by the phone in her mom’s apartment, even though she knew Rayanne was across the country. “There’s no Angela Chases out here. How’s Ohio?”

“There’s no Rayanne Graffs out there,” Angela said. “Guess where I am?”

“Where?”

“I’m sitting on Jordan Catalano’s bed.”

Rayanne made a high pitched excited sound. “Oh, is the fifteen-year-old inside you dying right now?”

The group in the living room started the countdown to the year 2000. She picked up a grey sock next to her and cradled the phone against her shoulder. “I don’t know, she’s not around anymore.”

“Good, leave her in the 20th century, she’s so old school.”

She heard them yell, “Happy new year!” Maybe she should have been out there with them, Rickie and Sharon and even Jordan, but there was a reason she was in here with Rayanne.

“Sounds like I’m speaking to you in a different Millenium,” Rayanne said, “Feel free to hang up if our inter-millennial lives are too different to maintain a conversation.”

“They’re not,” Angela said, “they never were.”

**Author's Note:**

> I rewatched the pilot recently (It's going off Hulu in a couple days!) and in it Brian talks about the year 2000, and wondering what it will be like. Here's what it's like. This takes some elements of what Winnie said would happen if the show had continued, but ditches some as well. 
> 
> I know and you know that the new millenium actually stared in 2001 but these kids do not.
> 
> If you read this that is so cool I'm anticipating a hit count of 0. <3


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